You are browsing archives for

Category: My Work

Another Issue of IRRODL out the door

March 3, 2009Written by terrya

We are pleased to release another fine issue of International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL). This issue marks our 10th year of publication and I am confident that IRRODL is now the most widely read and cited distance education journal in the world. We present in this issue 8 peer reviewed scholarly articles (from 5 continents), and 2 book reviews. There is also an editorial from Brigette McConkey, new IRRODL Managing editor which lists the top downloaded article stats from 2008 and an offer to apply as IRRODL Book Review editor.

Free subscription to IRRODL

Vol 10, No 1 (2009)

Editorial

IRRODL Editorial	HTML PDF MP3
Terry Anderson

IRRODL is Growing!	HTML PDF MP3
Brigette McConkey

Main Section

Kothmale Community Radio Interorg Project: True Community Radio or Feel-Good Propaganda?	Abstract HTML PDF MP3
Liz Francisca Rosalia Harvey-Carter	Article 10.1.1

Critical and Higher Order Thinking in Online Threaded Discussions in the Slovak Context	Abstract HTML PDF MP3
Katarina Pisutova-Gerber, Jana Malovicova	Article 10.1.2

Increasing Public Access to University Qualifications: Evolution of The University of the West Indies Open Campus	Abstract HTML PDF MP3
Michael L. Thomas, Judith Soares	Article 10.1.3

Research and Practice in K-12 Online Learning: A Review of Open Access Literature	Abstract HTML PDF MP3
Cathy S. Cavanaugh, Michael K. Barbour, Tom Clark	Article 10.1.4

Integrated Networks: National and International Online Experiences	Abstract HTML PDF MP3
Osvaldo Antonio Muniz-Solaris, Christine Coats	Article 10.1.5

Interaction Equivalency in Self-Paced Online Learning Environments: An Exploration of Learner Preferences	Abstract HTML PDF MP3
Jason Rhode	Article 10.1.6

Recurring Issues Encountered by Distance Educators in Developing and Emerging Nations	Abstract HTML PDF MP3
Clayton R. Wright, Gajaraj Dhanarajan, Sunday A. Reju	Article 10.1.7

Making Education Equitable in Rural China through Distance Learning	Abstract HTML PDF MP3
Shiling McQuaide	Article 10.1.8

Book Notes

Pask to the Future	HTML PDF MP3
Griff Richards

Distance Learning in Higher Education: A Programmatic Approach to Planning, Design, Instruction, Evaluation and Accreditation	HTML PDF MP3
Terry Anderson

Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work

How Green is Your Course?

February 9, 2009Written by terrya

In my recent talks, I’ve been reminding audiences of the green effect and the potential for reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption by choosing distance as opposed to campus based education. Ironically, I’ve often had to fly on a carbon footprint expanding airplane, to get to these conferences, but that is another irony that escapes few- especially my wife.

Although it seems obvious that studying at home will reduce transportation costs, there are many other ways in which participation in courses requires energy expenditure – from the extra costs of heating the house while you stay up late doing online work, to the cost of running the computer versus reading a book. It can become very complicated and challenging to quantify the differences. Thus, I was delighted to read the 2005 report from the Open University of the UK, that quantitatively addressed this issue. The report Towards Sustainable Higher Education: Environmental impacts of campus-based and distance higher education systems by R Roy, S Potter, K Yarrow, & M Smith is extensive (56 pages) and covers detail down to how many sheets of paper are consumed by both teachers and learners in a typical course delivered full or part time on campus or via learning or print based distance. The results are “that the distance learning courses examined on average involved nearly 90% (87%) less energy consumption and produced 85% fewer CO2 emissions per student per 10 CAT points than the conventional campus based university courses” The summary chart below illustrates the savings in energy consumption per 10 CATs (a British course unit – 360 CATs required for a degree).

The graph and commentary in the text notes that e-learning has a slightly lower impact on the environment than print based courses. “E-learning courses appear to offer only a small reduction in energy consumption and CO2 emissions (20% and 12% respectively) when compared to mainly print-based distance learning courses.” This was not a big surprise as I think the benefits of e-learning over print based relate more to pedgagogical flexibility, access to additional resources, groups, networks and collectives and access to multi-media than to energy savings alone.

I look forward to a follow up study that looks at blended learning models in which increases of online learning are paired with potential reduction in campus based activities. This will likely result in energy efficiencies, but if the students are forced to travel to campus everyday anyways for some ‘blended component” the energy or CO2 costs may actually increase as compared to straight campus based programming.

Congratulations to the the authors and the Open University for taking the time and effort to quantify the important envrionmental impacts of our choices of learning modality.

collective, Distance Education, My Work, PLEs energy, green

Configuring Google Scholar

January 16, 2009Written by terrya

2 Comments

I’m writing this mostly for the students in our own Distance Education program at Athabasca University, but it may be of interest to others holding access to a well connected research library.

By way of disclosure, let me state that I love and use Google Scholar on a daily basis. The only thing I don’t like is when I use regular Google searches or Google Scholar on another machine (like at a cafe). When I do, I continuously run into publishers wanting my credit card for a $30.00 hit for the article I’m searching for. I mean, the authors were paid nothing for the article and it may be well out of print, yet I should pay $30.00 – not likely!!!

I’m a faculty member at a Canadian University and like all faculty, students and staff here I get ‘FREE’ access to a variety of proprietary journals that are aggregated to make paying their fees easier for me and for the library administration. At Athabasca, I’m told we pay $350,000 (Canadian) per year for this service. This gives us most (in my case maybe 95%) of the journal articles I am interested in retrieving. Thus, lots of incentive to use the service. The problem, is how do I know what articles my Athabasca library card provides for free! The gurus at Google figured this out, by scanning all the Athabasca collections and then they match any of my Google Scholar search results with a flag to “get this through Athabasca Library”. Or as Google itself describes it “Google works with libraries to determine which journals and papers they’ve subscribed to electronically, and then links to articles from those sources when they’re available. Once you tell us what library you’re a member of, we’ll keep an eye out for that library’s subscription materials and provide special links to them in your search results”. It then automates the search process by creating a direct link (no cut and paste, or retyping) to that article – after a quick and once a day trip to the library login window. Thus, I am saved the trouble of searching directly in the library database and I get free access. All Good!

Distance Education, My Work Googlescholar open access

First Experience Asssessing E-Portfolios

December 17, 2008Written by terrya

3 Comments

As an instructor in Athabasca University‘s Master of Distance Education program, I was involved in providing an e-portfolio option to replace the standard comprehensive exam process for non thesis route students. The old ‘comps’ consisted of the candidate writing yet two more essays on material covered in the porgram and defending the essays with two faculty members via audio conference. As students in our program write at least 30 papers over the course of the 11 courses in the program the added value of writing yet two more seems of little value.

We use the elgg platform with its “presentation” plugin to create the e-portfolio. We extracted the graduate competencies from throughout the program and then required students to demonstrate with a blog reflection and an artifact or two from their course work or ‘real life’ to show how they have achieved this competence. The assignment also called for a final terminal “reflection” on the whole program and the e-portfolio exercise.Read More

Distance Education, My Work e-portfolio

Marking with Voice tools

December 14, 2008Written by terrya

10 Comments

I have nearly completed this term’s paper and report marking using Adobe Acrobat to add voice comments and annotations. In a word, the results are terrific!!

First, it saved me time. I am not a fast typer and using voice, meant I didn’t even have to spell check!! My comments were much longer than text annotations and I was able to give examples, suggestions etc. that I could have done in text, but likely would not have due to time constraints.

Second, I was able to express more affect by chuckling, expressing uncertainty and in other ways adding a personal touch to the marking.

Three, I was still able to add text comments and a marking rubric at the end using a text annotation tool that floated over the text and allowed me to annotate without disturbing the text, as it would if I made tracked changes using Word (I could of course, have used Word’s comment feature with similar results).

Four, initial feedback from students seem very positive.

So I think voice annotation of essays and term projects will win a place in my teachers “personal learning environment”

How did I do it? Following the inspiration and great work of Phil Ice et al. (see an excellent paper on the subject here) I purchased a copy of the full version of Acrobat (not just the reader). Educational price was $160 Canadian with tax and it installed easily on my Mac. I tried using the internal mic, but I could not reduce the quality of the recording enough to create ‘efficient recordings” – ones that are small enough to be emailed. Unfortunately, the MacBook doesn’t accept a regular PC microphone, so I had to buy the iMic accessory that hooks into the USB port and provides a normal microphone in and out. I could then use Audio Midi Setup tools to reduce the recording quality to 8000 Hz. This quality is fine for a single voice and gives 15 second annotations at about 200 KB. Phil tells me that this initial setup is much less problematic on a Windows machine.

On my first try I hadn’t reduced the audio quality and the result was a paper of 25 MBytes, which choked my email system. Later, with reduction in HZ, final projects were in the 2-10 MByte range, with my voice annotations. I realized later that by using the Moodle drop box for returning assignments, I didn’t have to worry so much about the email restrictions, however large file size is a concern on any voice or video annotation application. I did have to reload two files which seemed to have gotten damaged in delivery to Moodle, but it could have been my impatience at fault.

A few years ago, I had used the voice annotation tools built into Microsoft Word, but had to abandon the project when the files got absolutely HUGE. I haven’t played with Office 2007/8 versions, so maybe the quality reduction for voice annotation can be done with Word as well, but I do recommend the Acrobat tool for ease of use- though I did have to convert every Word file submitted to a PDF (quite easily done using the save as PDF feature in Word 2008).

So thanks Phil for excellent advice and demonstartion of this tool at last years Canadian Network for Innovation in Education conference.

I’m a believer!! There are many ways to improve education, but few that also save teacher time!

Distance Education, educational social software, My Work voice annotation

Canada/ Brazil Distance International Education Symposium

November 15, 2008Written by terrya

2 Comments

I’m sitting in the Rio airport one leg down and three to go on my way home from the Canadian-Brazil International Seminar on Distance Education, just concluded in Goianas. The seminar featured presentations and lots of questions from about 200 Brazilian delegates and Canadian DEers Heather Kanuka, Griff Richards, Elizabeth Murphy and myself. I did two presentations, the first titled Distance Education: Past, Present and Future and a shorter panel presentation on quality in distance education.

Elizabeth was the star of the show, with her panel presentation in Portuguese. She also had her video camera out and captured a few minutes of my concluding comments on Web 2.0 implications for quality DE programming. The camera angle reveals my midriff bulge that increased significantly after five days of fine Brazilian food and beer. She uploaded the video to YouTube, demonstrating the ease with which video can be captured and shared with minimal editing.

Brazil is well on its way to developing a vibrant online distance education community with a consortium (Brazilian Open University consortium) supporting course development and learning centre support for a number of Universities. I have a lingering fear that the 30 person max cohort model of asynchronous online courses, may fall short of meeting the large demand for postsecondary education. But as pointed out by Brazilian colleagues, Brazilian culture is one of conversation and communication and perhaps the more cost effective “industrial model” used by most of the Open Universities in developing countries, is not a good match. I was always surprised how few students were carrying laptops (or at least have ready access to desktop machines) , which seems to be a prerequisite for the type of online distance education predominately practiced in Canada. This reinforces my interest in self paced courses that allow options for cooperation and collaboration using social software and promise more scalable models than the 30 student, teacher led cohort.

Distance Education, educational social software, My Work, Uncategorized

Web Learning about Web Learning for teachers

September 8, 2008Written by terrya

4 Comments

On one of my shortest transatlantic jaunts, I spent 3 days this week with an international team developing a series of eight web based tutorials on e-learning for university faculty. The series is a bold, entrepreneurial attempt to speed the adoption and effective use of e-learning and online education resources beyond early adopters to the notoriously pedagogically and technically conservative, mainstream faculty employed in our universities. Unlike typical publicly funded professional development ventures in this arena, this project was sparked by Epigeum Ltd a spinoff from Imperial College, London.

Epigeum’s business model for this venture is to find a number of postsecondary institutions willing to fund the development of web based tutorials. These first, investing institutions get use of the materials and also provide reviewers, critics, pilot testers and consumer voices to insure the product meets real needs and administrative expectations. The financial model calls for additional institutions to sign on for licensing of the products after production – providing a profit for Epigeum.

The collaborative development model employed selects a grand guru, intellectual leader (in this case Diane Laurillard, of conversational learning model fame) and a team of module authors, ‘expert reviewers’ and end users – or at least those employed to train the end users. An author and an expert reviewer are selected and assigned to create curriculum for each of the 8 topics selected by the initial investing universities, the grand guru and Epigeum staff. In this case these ranged from Intro to E-Learning; Using third party content, Net based communications and five others. I’m not sure how I was selected to be a part of the development as an expert reviewer, but the development process sounded interesting, I’ve a lot of respect for Diane and we all know how desperate is the need for effective PD related to e-learning among this crowd.
The carbon footprint abuse comes from the proscribed Face-to-Face meeting which was held this week in London. Authors, reviewers and reps from investing institutions came from 6 countries (but mostly the UK) and converged for a day and half meeting. Hopefully effective use of google docs as well as lots of email will eliminate the need for further F2F meetings.

The process began three weeks ago with the course authors drafting and sharing for comment, a proposed syllabus (using Google docs). In order to maintain consistency each ‘module’ consists of an introduction, 12-15 ‘screens’ of content, a summary, a multiple choice quiz and a list of resources for further exploration. The design model also insists that modules are not cross linked to allow for modular use as learning objects. The Google docs spreadsheet module was employed so the content, and especially the learning outcome of each ‘screen’ is articulated by the author and vetted by the ‘ expert consultant and other members of the development team. Each module is designed to take 60-90 minutes of end user time to complete. Fortunately, Epigeum technicians and media experts will actually create the screens which (I understand) will make liberal use of video, animation and other multimedia resources. The modules are formatted to meet IMS content packaging standard so that they can ‘eaten up’ and delivered by a variety of LMS (OK make that VLEs, in the UK) delivery systems.

I’m looking forward to seeing the products as they evolve and we discussed a multiple case study design to study their actual use – given the wide variety of contexts and manners in which they COULD be utilized and supported in the subscribing and subsequent purchasing institutions.

My greatest concern is with the “direct instruction” teaching/learning model employed. Australia’s famed educational theorist, Shirley Alexander asked a pointed question to Diane Laurillard, after her initial ‘what is this all about’ presentation, questioning what learning (or instructional ) model was being employed in the design. Uncharacteristically, she dodged the question, but direct instruction jumped to mind.

I know that professional academics are busy people and are used to the “tell ‘em what you are gong to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; and then tell ‘em what you told ‘em; model” of instruction and this MAY work for the real thirsty. But I wish we could learn to spark interest in the most exiting and revolutionary technology ever to be used for formal instruction, in ways that were just a bit more designed to fire the imagination and engagement of users – both as learners and as teachers.

I’ll report later as this project moves to release of product (about 9 months) and distribution to initial and additional consumer institutions. Meanwhile I am sure Epigeum would welcome further inquiry into purchase or support and it is nice to see PD models emerging that are not dependent upon whining for new money from government.

Distance Education, My Work epigeum

Creating Personal Networks as Learning Outcome

August 14, 2008Written by terrya

1 Comment

Thanks to Stephen and Graham Atwell, I discovered a fascinating development in the Personal learning Environment development. To date most of the PLE implementations I have seen have been aggregators of RSS feeds, with not much more functionality than a iGoogle or Pageflake portal. The paper “Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments” by Fridolin Wild, Felix Mödritscher and Steinn Sigurdarson introduces (to me) a markup language by which designers or learners create scripts of learning activities that in room time mashup a host of Web 2.0 tools that allow individual or groups of learners to create their own learning context and content. In the process, of course, they gain skills of media production, increase their social capital by expanding and deepening personal networks and create archives of artifacts available for retrieval by themselves and others.

The background to the paper overviews the importance of the creation of an adaptable context that the learner creates to support and retain their own learning. They note ” It is not about learning design it is all about learning environment design”. By letting learning emerge from rich inquiry, collaboration and publication tools, learners are able to play active roles in the creation and sustenance of their own learning contexts. These skills, the contexts and the products of course do not end when the course LMS site is closed, but rather become life long learning attributes and capacity. Thus the creation of a rich learning environment that the student creates, owns and continuous to build with is the major learning outcome, the specific knowledge domain outcomes are useful but less important outcomes in a life long learning context.

Wild, Mödritscher & Sigurdarson Iintroduce the Learner Interaction Scripting Language (LISL) which they argue is less cumbersome and more easily configured by users to create and exchange learning activities. The model derives from activity theory with roles for tools, actors, activities and actors and grows from a bottom up perspective as opposed to the top down perscriptions associated with IMS Learning Design. These are scripted and supposedly a run time engine mashes various applications (such as Wikis, schedulers, link aggregators, mindmap tools etc in real time. The activities can saved and edited in chunks the size of patterns.

While the article is not detailed on the availability of a run time engine to execute the scripts, the work seems very promising. Beyond the pedagogical insights of environmental development, is the promise of learning activities that can EASILY be created, shared, contextualized and exchanged.

My Work, PLEs